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The Northern Void video is a post-apocalyptic pastoral mediation on what will become of the suburbs in the far future. Bypassing any statistical analysis, this work chooses to freely imagine what will occur in a century from now at the locus of our most banal surroundings. Taking a strip of Plenty Rd. Preston as an emblematic environment of how life currently exists, Northern Void observes and transforms its locality into a gradually decaying dystopia of everyday collapse.
At the tram stops, petrol stations and intersections which comprise the uniform flow of people and cars in the pathways that stretch deep into the suburbs, one can already witness how Plenty Rd. Preston encapsulates the death of the 'high street'. Once a thoroughfare and vital access enabled by one of Melbourne's typical tram routes, it is scored by small businesses that have gradually withered over the last three decades of commercial enterprise and franchised dreaming. Cracked 60s brickwork, shrivelled 70s council shrubbery, peeling 80s computer-typeset signage, 90s Day-Glo painted lettering on darkened windows - Plenty Rd. Preston is like the corpus of business: dying slowly while tethered to an indifferent life-support system.
To travel this stretch with open eyes, one can witness something more than mere banality and ugliness: these are the scars of failed work modes, outdated visions, fatalistic endeavours. Inspired by the deep nothingness of this environment from Philip Brophy's own childhood, Northern Void extends the atmosphere of this slowly dying realm into a cosmological rumination of how desperate and futile 'doing business' can be.
BUY Northern Void directly through Sound Punch Records online using PayPal from October 2008.
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